Unrelated, but relevant point to the discussion: pay for good long form content. It costs quite a bit to produce it. If you love it, buy it.
I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.
The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.
The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.
Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.
I truly believe that quality will win out over quantity in the long run. The race to churn out SEO-based, high-volume, crap-quality content farms represented the first phase in online journalism. It was a race to the bottom. Sure, that race had some early winners. But the race has been run. The bottom has been hit. There's no more profit to be reaped there, and besides, the model makes less and less sense vis-a-vis today's internet.
That's because the future of the mass content aggregation business now belongs to Facebook, and to other social networking services yet to come. Aggregation websites are going to look very anachronistic in the coming years, while content-specialist sites will have to differentiate on subject matter and on quality.
So what does this mean for content producers? Well, it's no longer about mass aggregation of cheaply produced crap. It's now about being a high-quality producer, whose content is more likely to get pickup up ("earned," in media parlance) by Facebook users, as well as by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking algorithms. Thoughtful pieces will matter. Well-written pieces will matter.
It's not easy, and there's no guarantee that it'll be profitable. And unfortunately, the advertisers will be monetized by the aggregation layer (Facebook, most likely) on which content producers will depend. So that leaves pay-gates and subscriptions, both of which can be circumvented, and which are often loathed by readers. But however the winning business model gets figured out, quality will almost certainly play a crucial role in it.
I sincerely hope you're correct. The analogue to the Internet in Neal Stephenson's Anathem is hardly used. Only those who specialise in digging useful information out of the piles of autogenerated crud bother with it.
I have worked almost a decade in the online media industry in my previous life and I don't find this particularly surprising. Somewhere around 2005, everyone in the industry discovered this major obsession with doing stories based on SEO, than doing stories that did well on their own merit. Unfortunately, everyone jumped onboard with this idea as it made sense at scale. Fortunately, half-a-decade down the line, we seem to be waking up to the fact that not everyone can make a living at scale; only a few can accomplish the scales to justify that.
The others have to focus on quality, than quantity, to bring them the traffic.
The other unspoken part of the content business is that a tiny minority of the people who matter in the business actually understand the numbers. Most don't understand anything beyond total pageviews and then starts the hunt to increase them at any cost. The dumbest way to increase pageviews is to do more stories, but they often don't understand the fact that doing more stories don't come for free and that each story is not as productive as the other in getting them more traffic.
Quality works, but quality is not easy. It is hard work, time-consuming and there are no quick fixes.